Scotch Tape Has Really Stuck Around

Carol Polsky, Newsday

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, October 18, 2000

In 1925, the world's first pressure- sensitive adhesive tape -- Scotch brand masking tape -- quietly entered the world. But the world would have to wait five years more for its inventor, a young 3M engineer named Richard Drew, to introduce what would plainly become his masterpiece: clear cellophane- backed tape.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And history has shown that the mundane uses of this amazingly enduring product, celebrating its 75th year -- such as sealing envelopes, wrapping gifts, patching ripped paper, temporarily repairing broken eyeglass frames -- only begin to scrape the surface of its rich and varied utility.

"Something like Scotch tape is the holy grail of inventors," said MIT grad David Levy, an inventor who a few years ago won the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lemuelson Prize for his overall inventiveness. "As an inventor, you're always trying to contribute something that permeates society rather than punctuates a few people's lives."

"A surprisingly large number of things are taped together, like cars for instance," he said, noting that tapes with adhesive on both sides are used in attaching car upholstery.

And airplanes, too, said Jean Sweeney, 3M business unit director for the Scotch tape brands. Four divisions of 3M use the Scotch brand product name, three of them industrial, she said. And hundreds of engineers and researchers work on product applications in electronics, papermaking, packaging and manufacturing.

Very high-bond double-sided adhesives are used in attaching overlapping layers of metal skins to a plane's frame. It's used as a replacement for screws, rivets and welds.

Two-tone cars were popular then, and painting them required the painters to mask one section while painting another in a different color. But the glues they used to attach the masking paper often ruined the paint job underneath when the paper was ripped off.

Drew went into the laboratory to experiment with adhesives. Two years later he came out with a masking tape using crepe paper with lines of pressure-sensitive glue running along the edges on one side.

Trouble was, the tape kept falling off, and as the story goes, an automotive painter told a 3M representative to go back to his "Scotch" (i.e., parsimonious) bosses and tell them to put adhesive all over the tape, not just on the edges. They did, the tape worked and the name stuck.

Drew was then asked to develop a waterproof tape to seal insulation panels for refrigerated railroad cars. Overcoming numerous production difficulties, Drew and his colleagues developed the clear, cellophane- backed tape so familiar today.

In 1932, a 3M sales manager named John Borden designed the first heavy-duty tape dispenser with a built-in cutter blade, making the tape much easier to use. In 1961, 3M engineers came out with Scotch Magic tape, which wouldn't yellow or ooze adhesive, while appearing frosty on the roll but invisible on the page.

But now the company is innovating with ways to dispense the tape, from pop-up, pre-cut strips to portable dispensers.

"Whenever an invention is made, it's unclear how deep it will enter a society," Levy said.

"I think Drew saw a few applications but never saw how many uses it would be put to . . . an invention like that is underappreciated at both ends: In the beginning, people don't understand how many doors are going to be opened, and looking back, people don't appreciate how broadly the innovation has affected us."